


the horse i rode to get out

by broken_social_contract



Series: each choice, a universe [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 22:43:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broken_social_contract/pseuds/broken_social_contract
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Emma takes them on a road trip to escape Cora.</p><p>[Mostly canon compliant up to 2x01, then diverges from there]</p>
            </blockquote>





	the horse i rode to get out

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing, but my mistakes (which I try to fix later, eventually).

_I've been trying to get it right.  
_ _I've been learning here how to grow larger  
_ _than the monsters alive in my dreams;_  
\- Buddy Wakefield, 'Horsehead'

 

\--

 

 

The Bug lurches forward, picking up speed as the edge of town draws near. Henry’s pitches into the space between the front seats, hands coming up to brace his fall with the headrests on the two front seats.

                      

 “Seatbelt,” Emma orders without so much as a glance back, and Henry sighs in response, tired and mildly annoyed. His fingers fumble in the dark for the buckle, and they shake as he tries to click it in. He blames it on Emma’s reckless driving instead of the fear pressing nightmares into his body coursing round and round and round with each beat of his heart.

 

They fly past the town line at eighty-three miles an hour. Henry bounces an inch in the air as Emma guns it fast, faster, fastest towards the interstate, wheels screaming underneath them with each sharp turn down winding country roads.

                                               

In the passenger seat, his mother stays silent and still.

 

 

\--

 

 

“Regina?” He hears Emma ask later, when she thinks he’s fallen asleep.

 

They are hours from Storybrooke now, on an interstate with trucks and cars and people who have never been touched by the fallout of magic. Henry can feel traces of sunlight against his face and thinks how fitting to drive into a sunrise.

                                               

“Regina?” Emma tries again.

                                               

He can hear his own heartbeat in the quiet, pounding away at his ears like a message in Morse code, whispering what-ifs and regrets and that old fear again, the one when he was 6 and would wake up from nightmares alone in his bed, the one where’s his mother leaves him to fight the monsters by himself.

                                                        

“Still me.” His mother breaks the silence.

 

He feels himself sag with relief.

 

 

\--

 

 

He closes his eyes in Maine and opens them again in a parking lot of a diner somewhere in Vermont.

 

“We’re stopping to eat,” Emma explains as he pushes himself into a sitting position and rubs roughly at his face, trying to smudge away the last remnants of sleep still stuck to the back of his eyelids.

 

He had dreamt they made it and there’s a part of him that wants to sink back to that dream, away from the reality of _haven’t made it, yet_.

 

He spies the empty passenger seat and frowns at it. “Where’s my Mom?”

                                                                                                       

“She went inside to grab us a table.”

                                      

Henry waits impatiently for Emma to pull her seat forward after she climbs out the car, and wonders fleetingly why his mother and Emma prefer such impractical two-door cars with barely any space to move. He uncurls and stretches when his feet hit the asphalt, fingers stretching for the cool blue sky above him. His muscles and bones sigh in relief at the movement, at all the space he can once again occupy.

 

If he ever gets a chance, he wants a large car, an SUV or a pick-up truck or a van. If he ever lives long enough.

 

“Alright, come on, kid.” Emma orders. Henry catches the twitch of her hand, the one closest to him, catches its rise and fall in the air, swinging in his direction only to swing back like a pendulum.

 

He finds himself grinning at the back of her head when she turns around to lead him towards the restaurant. An amused laugh tries to bubble its way up his throat, but he swallows it down and runs towards her, instead, loose gravel crunching under his Converse.

                   

His hand reaches for hers without hesitation, curling around her longer, larger fingers, to do what she couldn’t because they’ve come a long way from a year before but there are still wounds and hurts to stitch together.

 

He still catches Emma watching him cautiously, hugging him reluctantly, like too much of her in his life will cut him down somehow.

 

(And, under all his bravado, he hates her a little for not trusting him before, for believing in him only after he’d fallen under the spell leaving him stuck between worlds.)

 

Emma stiffens for a second before she squeezes his hand, peering at him fondly over her shoulder as she does so.

 

“Thanks,” he remembers to say before she walks through the entrance, “for saving my Mom. I know you didn’t have to.”

 

 _Or want to_ , he thinks, but doesn’t say.

 

There’s a heavy beat that follows before Emma pulls her hand away gently and nudges him through the threshold first. The affection in her eyes from a second ago dims to something Henry can’t quite place.

 

“Don’t thank me yet, okay?”

 

It sounds like a warning, but a warning to what exactly Henry doesn’t know.

 

 

\--

 

 

Breakfast is a quiet affair and it works his nerves raw.

 

Even worse, his pancakes are terrible and nothing like the pancakes at Granny’s diner.

 

It’s the pancakes that finally drive home the loss of Storybrooke, of his childhood home, of the people in the town he’s known all his life – Granny and Ruby and Archie and _Snow_. It’s a sucker punch to the stomach, sending air rushing out his lungs in an instant.

 

“Did I tell you about the ogres, kid?” Emma says across from him as he blinks at the pain settling between his eyes.

 

He jerks his head up, pulling his eyes away from his food, and shakes his head no.

 

She grins, likes they’re having breakfast at Granny’s, like it’s any other day of the week, and launches into a story about three tall ogres ( _“ugly looking monsters with leather green skin, seven feet tall at least, and they smelled like yesterday’s trash”_ ) she takes on single-handedly to save Aurora and Mulan.

                               

“You and I both know that is bold-faced lie,” his mother cuts in. Her arm reaches around his shoulders and pulls him close to her as if to keep him away from Emma. He leans in to her touch, partly out of fear that rejecting her now will scare her back into that eerie stupor she had fallen into since they left Storybrooke, partly out of the need for something familiar in the face of everything foreign.

 

“I will not have you filling his head with stories.”

 

 “How would you know? You weren’t there.” Emma’s eyebrows shoot up in challenge as she shovels a fork of scrambled eggs into her mouth.

                                 

Henry almost cracks a smile.

 

“No one has ever been able to kill an ogre single-handedly without the use of magic.”

 

“Then, I guess I was the first to do it.”

                                       

He listens to them bicker harmlessly, cutting in only once or twice in the fleeting moments his chest isn’t tight with a longing for home. Their conversation falls to the background, especially when it lapses into the _where_ and _how_ and _what_ of the day, merging with the oldies station playing in the diner to become a comforting sort of white noise to distract him from his own head.

 

It’s not until he’s crawling into the backseat of the car that he catches his reflection on the mirror -- red rimmed eyes and tell-tale signs of tears he’d thought he had blinked away.

 

“Seatbelt,” his mother reminds him as Emma slowly pulls out of the parking lot. She angles her body to watch him, so he makes a big show of buckling himself in, taking twice as long to pull the strap around his body and sighing as he does so.

 

The smile she offers him afterwards, pained and sincere and real, resembles an apology, or at least, the start of one.

 

He opens his mouth to say something back, about Storybrooke and home and choices, about how he chooses her even if it confuses him, scares him even, but she’s turned back around by the time he finds the courage to say it.

 

 

\--

 

 

The first night, they stay in a Super 8 in upstate New York.

                                                                      

It looks and smells worse than the rooms at Granny’s, but at least there are beds, a shower, and TV. 

 

Henry’s never been happier to take a shower, has never fully appreciated the opportunity to stand under the cool spray of water after a long day but he does tonight. His muscles go slack and loose, and the tension from sitting all day in a cramped backseat washes away with the grime. By the time he shuts the water off, his hands are wrinkled, peaks and valleys of skin appearing on the pads of his fingers.

 

He catches their muffled voices as he’s drying off. He listens because Henry has never learned how to stay out of other people’s business.

                                               

“We’re not turning around.” Emma’s voice rings out clear and loud and furious.

 

He wills his heart not to pound so loud so he can hear.

 

“Quiet down...” His mother’s voice trails off and the words that follow sound more like a hum than a language. Henry has to angle his body sideways, head bent towards the door while he tugs on a pair of basketball shorts, to try and hear better.

                                      

“I don’t care. He’s not going to miss that town more than he’s going to miss you.”

 

“My mother promised his safety—“

 

“— in exchange for _you._ Do you think he wants you under Cora’s control just so he can be safe?”

 

“Keep your voice down.” It comes out as a hiss.

 

He misses the ensuing conversation, the words a quiet sort of buzz until: “What the hell, Regina, are you even listening to yourself?”

 

“One day, you’re going to look back and regret leaving your parents behi-“

 

It cuts off into nothing, into something quiet and sinister and Henry worries that they’re working their way into killing each other instead of acting like a team. He grabs his t-shirt from the counter and yanks it over his head quickly. The cotton sticks to his still damp skin as he pulls at the door and half runs back out into the room.

                        

He finds Emma sitting at the edge of one of the beds and his mother on the other, her back turned to both of them as she rifles through the duffel bag in front of her.

 

“Hey,” Emma says, awkwardly. Her voice sounds rough and a little out of breath.

                          

He watches them for a long moment, the lecture he wanted to give disappearing into the details that don’t quite add up.

 

He feels young all of a sudden, standing there having a staring contest with Emma whose smile is too tight and uncomfortable while his mother remains turned around digging and digging through that too small duffel where nothing could really be lost, her shirt wrinkled and hanging oddly on her frame.

 

He feels like he’s been thrust into some grown-up world whose rules he hasn’t learned yet, thrust into something that has no precedent, and it worries him.

 

               

\--

 

                                            

He startles awake after a bad dream, limbs jerking in opposite directions. His arm slaps against empty space where his mother should be, and it snaps him into action, panic crashing into him hard and fast, as he pushes himself up onto his hands and knees.

                           

Just as he’s about to yell for Emma, he spots her silhouette outside the window, back bent over the railing.

 

The door squeaking open gives him away.

 

“Go back to bed, Henry,” she tells him without turning around. He scowls at her back before ignoring her request, and moves to stand beside her against the railing. The door clicks shut behind them, electronic lock whirring into place. 

 

“I thought you were gone,” he says, voice rough with emotion. His pulse is only now slowing down, levelling back into something more normal and less loud against his ears. “You shouldn’t wander off.”

 

She cranes her neck to face him, head tilted so that they’re mostly at eye level with each other. “I can take care of myself, Henry,” she says kindly.

 

“But, me and Emma.” He pauses at his mother’s look. “Emma and I can help, too,” he finishes stubbornly.

 

He watches the first fragments of light bursting through the darkness and lets out a shaky breath to release the nervous energy building inside him. “Even when I’m mad at you, I’ve never wished for you to… to die.” The word hurts on its way out, barely slinking past mashed lips.

 

It’s honest and true and weird to say out loud because a part of him thinks she should just _know_ it. That when he had been pushing and rebelling and screaming at her, he always had an expectation that she would be present the next day and the day after that and _the day after that_.

                                    

“I know.”

 

He frowns, thinking of the conversation she and Emma were having last night while he had been in the shower.

 

“No, I don’t think you do,” he sighs. “It’s just that Mom, you made me feel _crazy_ for a whole year. There were days I thought I really was.” He keeps his eyes on her, and hopes that she’s listening, _really_ listening.

                                                                            

“I went to find Emma because I wanted to prove I was normal, I wanted it so bad, Mom. I just wanted to not be crazy. And, then the clocks moved and the curse was real and I was just… _so mad_. I thought you couldn’t possibly love me because how could you love someone who you treat like that?”

 

“Henry—“

 

He shakes his head. “— _so_ I wanted to be really mean to you back, but I don’t want us to keep hurting each other anymore. And, I don’t want you to leave _me._ ”

 

The desperation is plain in his voice, that awful panic from minutes earlier coming back in full force. The sheets had been cool to touch when his hand fell there, as if she had been gone for hours – he had thought maybe she was a whole universe away, too far from reach.

                                                            

“I won’t,” his Mom says firmly, hand reaching to cup his face. “And, I am sorry about all of it, Henry. If I could change what happened, I would.”

 

He nods against her hand, and lets himself lean into it. “Do you think we can work on being a family again?”

                                            

“I would love that.” The edges of her lips curl up in a smile that is unguarded and genuine. His chest feels full at the sight of it, packed with an ever expanding galaxy of hope. It reminds him of the time before fairy tales, before the Evil Queen and Snow White and a magical curse that turned his world upside down. She had been his whole world, then, their relationship so simple and uncomplicated.

 

But, he knows he can’t return to that, can’t revert to the six year old who loved her blindly and unfailingly, so he just sticks with the here and now.

 

With the future and all that hope.

 

(He also considers asking if she and Emma could fight less, but he doesn’t want to push it.)

 

                       

\--

 

 

At breakfast, Emma makes an announcement that surprises both Henry and his mom. His hand clutching a fork - pancakes stabbed through the ends of it - hovers in midair allowing the syrup to dribble down his wrist.

                                                                                                                                

“But you _love_ that car.” Henry gapes.

 

His mom goes quiet beside him.

 

“It makes us easier to find.” Emma flushes a faint red and avoids his gaze. “And, that car’s not going to make it to California.”

 

“We’re going to California?” He remembers to put his fork down and glances between the both of them. His wrist and forearm are sticky so he keeps it hanging in the air away from everything else, and fights the urge to lick at it, knowing it will lead to a lecture on table manners.

                                                                                                                                          

“Washington and Oregon are options, too. Anywhere on the other side of the country is a good place to start.” Emma pokes at her own plate of food.

 

“What do you think, Regina?” Emma says, muted and lacking her normal bluster.

 

Henry’s reminded of the motel room the night before, of a grown-up world he doesn’t yet know how to navigate, a world where Emma’s eyes flash with something unfamiliar for the fleetest of moments as she waits expectantly for his mom to respond.

 

“Are you suggesting we steal a car? Because I can assure that I am not letting you and will never let you teach Henry that particular family business.”

 

Emma rolls her eyes and Henry’s tries to hide a smirk into his chocolate milk, lifting it up to his mouth and gulping it down.

 

“We would _buy_ the car.”

 

His mom’s eyebrow shoots up, “With what money?”

 

It feels like watching a tennis match, his head swiveling back and forth between the both of them as they volley words back and forth.

 

“I thought we could split it.”

 

“Split it?”

 

“Trade the Bug in, pay for the new car in full. In cash, so no one can trace it. I’ve got enough for half of a used car. I bet you’ve got more than enough for the other half. We could get something bigger, newer. Something with four doors.”

 

Henry cuts in with the deciding vote, “I vote yes to four doors.”

 

Emma beams at him. If it weren’t for the glare his mom shoots at the pair of them, eyes narrowed and focused like a pair of laser beams trying to cut them down, he has feeling Emma would reach over and give him a high-five.

                                                                          

“I just have two conditions,” she relents with a long suffering sigh Henry thinks is mostly for show.

 

 

\--

 

 

They settle on a black pick-up truck with four doors, a leather interior, and room to stretch in the backseat. Henry bounces up and down the entire ten minute drive to the gas station to fill-up.

 

It’s the largest car he’s been in, larger than David’s truck even, with windows and doors in the back he can control himself. If he tries hard enough, he can pretend it’s a vacation, a summer trip with his family to _somewhere_ – Disneyland or the Sears Tower or Yellowstone.

 

“Go grab us some snacks, yeah?” Emma says, handing him a few crumpled bills she fishes from her pocket.

                                   

He snatches it before his mom can say anything about nutrition and dashes into the mini-mart, a list of junk food already formulated in his head: Apollo bars, Doritos, and Combos. He picks up a few comic books from the rack of magazines and three neon colored bug-eye sunglasses because it’s a _summer road trip_ , he tells himself again and again, a scratched record on infinite loop.

                                            

While the cashier scans his loot, he catches them, and all of it – the last 72 hours, the last month even, why it was Emma that had fallen into the portal, why it was Emma who stopped the mob in that first hour after the curse broke -- slides into place. His breath hitches in his throat, trapped there as his chest constricts. A collection of emotions hits him like waves coming up to shore, crashing continuously and relentlessly.

 

Confusion and hurt and surprise, rinse and repeat.

                                                                   

Emma’s leaning against the truck bed one hand behind her on the pump, the other right there on his mom’s side, fingers splayed and curled around her hip. It’s a serious conversation, he can tell, because his mom’s face is hard and stony and Emma’s forehead is wrinkled and knit together, but still – there’s Emma’s hand on his mom’s hip and both their bodies bent towards each other.

_Intimate_ , he thinks after searching his brain for the proper word.

                                            

“That’ll be $27.56.” The cashier’s tired voice snaps him out of his thoughts.

 

“Could I add that camera, too?” He asks, pointing to the disposable one hanging on a rack behind the register, and hands over two crumpled twenty dollar bills.

 

By the time, he makes it back outside, his mom is in the truck and Emma is out by the gas pump alone, screwing the cap back in place.

 

“Did you buy out the store?” Emma teases, gesturing at the large black plastic bag in his hand.

 

He grins, pushing aside his questions for another day, any other day but today because today is a day of firsts, Henry decides, the good kind of firsts – like buying a car together type of firsts.

 

“Sort of. It’s my first road trip you know? Mom’s too. We’ve never been this far from Storybrooke so I thought we should remember it.” He shakes the disposable camera at her before clambering back into the truck.

                                                                                                                                                

He makes them smile for his first picture, asks them to turn around in their seats and tilt their head towards each other so he can fit them both in the frame. They oblige eventually after some protests – his mom huffs and Emma rolls her eyes but he catches that fleeting look between them just before they listen to him, the one from before he couldn’t name but thinks he sort of understands now – it's a distant relative of affection, guarded and thorny and complicated.

 

“Do I have to keep wearing these glasses?”

 

“Yes.” Henry grins, sticking his face between the two front seats, his own pair of bug-eyes sitting on his face. “It’s going to be tradition, Emma.”

                                                                                                                                                                     

He hopes they make it to Pike’s Market or Sea World or the Grand Canyon, hopes they make it long enough to develop his roll of film (he even hopes they’ll make it back to Storybrooke one day, but he doesn’t waste too many wishes on that one).

 

He wants enough time to learn to be a family, too, or the closest approximation the three of them can muster with all their hurts and their walls and their past.

 

He's not holding his breath for _and then they lived happily ever after_ , but he thinks maybe they could get to _and then they lived_.

 

                                                                  

\--

_He wakes up to yelling and something sharp poking at his back – he grabs at it and finds himself clutching a seatbelt buckle, realizing belatedly that he's sitting in the backseat of Emma's Bug._

_It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the black and blue of night. His childhood home swims into view, all the lights turned off save for the porch light. It’s there he sees the source of the noise, the two of them standing a foot apart reminding him of that first night he brought Emma home._

_Under the soft glow, he catches his mother’s livid face, her narrowed eyes focused on Emma, whose own fists are curled tight at her sides._

_“Can you cross it without forgetting?”_

_“You can’t run away from everything. And, I’ve already made the deal.”_

_“Can you cross it?” Emma’s hand opens up only to twist around his mother’s arm as she surges forward up the steps. “That’s all I want to know.”_

_“Emma—“_

_“Can you cross it? Yes or no.” Emma says, slow and deliberate and desperate._

_Henry leans forward in his seat, anxious now too. His body hums with ‘please, please, please,’ with adrenaline and fear and hope and anticipation, until every cell in his body is begging for that same simple wish._

_“Yes,” his mother says, finally._

_\--_

 

And then, they lived.


End file.
